This is the piece of digital art that I created to accompany my Icon Alchemy astrology blog post for April 26th, 2017.

The photograph that I started from is of a section of a wooden screen that my stepmother brought back with her after living in India for many years. Throughout the years that I've known her, she longed to return there, having felt far more at home there than in the United States, yet she was never able to. Now, she is bed-ridden and lost in dementia and aphasia, and therefore will not return there physically in this lifetime, yet I am certain that her mind is there much of the time.

The New Moon in Taurus that is the focal point of the post this piece accompanies is all about tending to our needs for physical and material security, in turn feeding our emotional security. This screen figures prominently in my memories of childhood, that in turn impact my sense of both physical and emotional security as an adult now that I am back living in my stepmother's home and tending to her needs for physical and material security while simultaneously deeply questioning my own security on many levels. The colouring that I used for this piece was intended to emphasize moving from a sense of unreality at the bottom into new growth at the top. While Taurus is foundational and no doubt therefore would be better suited to having something more solid on the bottom of the piece, still I wanted to find a way to convey my hope that no matter how surreal the foundations of our upbringing, we can transform those shaky materials that we are working with into something more secure and more nurturing, and reset our foundation on a newer, more solid framework (the band of hearts just below the leaves at the top). We can grow something real and true in the new life that we create for ourselves, with all the uncertainties we started from consigned to the dreamworld beneath the soil. Our roots and our memories don't have to continue to poison us.